i whored for art…

Reading: Emma Goldman — Anarchism and Other Essays

This was a spontaneous purchase. In St George’s (huh! No, really?), snarfing a stack of Pratchetts, and the orange cover of Frau Goldman, that delightful, delectable word. Anarchism.

I’ve been facing a horrible venture into Marxism for over a month. Marx and international law, to be precise. And lashings of fucking dialectical materialism. I can’t stand Marxism; it’s erroneous much as Freud and psychoanalysis is, yet seems to form an uncritical foundation of european philosophy and leftist politics. Perhaps because I got exposed to anarchism through punk (or maybe my anarchist tendencies recognised their kin in punk), I’ve always found it to be a more sensible project than communism or socialism, though curiously I’ve read far more red politics than black.

So, Emma Goldman. Better to read a feminist, anarchist, atheist, and all the rest, than one of those boring old dead men with the big beards. It’s a bit of a history lesson too. Of course, something written over a hundred years ago does suffer from certain turns of speech, but really, I’m going to spend the rest of the night reading her and reminding myself why, if I have to subscribe to any political philosophy, it’s anarchism.